Poster: Experimental Evaluation of TCP Congestion Control over 60GHz WLAN

Abstract

The multi-Gbps bandwidth offered by 60GHz millimeter-wave (mmWave) links has enabled a wide range of applications such as untethered virtual reality, fast file synchronization, and uncompressed video streaming. To provide these applications with high network utilization while preventing overload, TCP congestion control (CC) determines the data sending rate to achieve high throughput and/or low delay. CC over highly fluctuating 60GHz networks is extremely challenging -- the high directionality and small wavelength of mmWave make it vulnerable to mobility and blockage. Despite numerous studies on CC in WiFi/LTE, CC in 60GHz remains underexplored. To the best of our knowledge, the only related work on CC in mmWave is~\citezhang2016transport. However, it's simulation-based and focuses on 28GHz mmWave cellular. Also, it only looks at loss-based CC algorithms and limited scenarios. We close this gap with a first experimental study that comprehensively evaluates the CC performance over commercial 60GHz WLAN using COTS devices. Our study aims to characterize the behavior and performance of different CC algorithms over 60GHz in a wide range of real-world mobility and blockage scenarios. We believe this is a critical step towards designing mmWave-friendly CC algorithms.